Windows M.E. problem.

Factual Questions
1

Here’s one that has me stumped at the moment.

A friend asked me to have a look at his PC that was “having problems” since last Thursday.

I’m pretty technical myself, but I’ve not worked with this version of Windows thus far.

The friend, is not technical at all, and the end-user even less so. As such, they did not write down the error messages being displayed.

When I arrived on-site, I was told that “the problem seems to have corrected itself”. I asked what they were seeing at the time, and was told that an error meesage would pop up stating that an error had occured in 3DTEXT, which is the 3DTEXT screen saver.

I changed the screen saver to something less graphics intensive on the off chance that the video card might not be able to handle it.

I then went to Control Panel, System Information in order to take a look at what Windows is “seeing”.

An HTML style page pops up, and after about a minute displays the following message:

The initialization of the Help Center failed. Please report the following error number to Microsoft Support -2147467259.

I suspected that possibly the help facility was trying to contact the MS Web Site but was unable since it’s a standalone PC.

I checked the Networking settings, and in fact it had been set up with MS Networking and TCP/IP enabled, even though this machine is not even on a LAN.

I disabled all the Networking features, rebooted but I still get the same error message.

Once the message is displayed, the system info never comes up. The message reamains on the screen, and the hourglass remains “forever”.

The box itself is not locked-up, I can minimize the Sysinfo window and start up other applications with no problems.

Any suggestions?

2

I think the main problem is that Windows ME sucks. I have this on one of my machines at home, and whenever we play a two-player game, when things get exciting it reboots. It doesn’t reboot on single-player games. It’s also a standalone PC, so I can’t go online for the Windows Update thingie. I tried reformatting it and loading Win98, but it’s got some hardware in it that Win98 doesn’t know about, so I’m going to have to reload it with my recovery disks and just accept not being able to play 2-player Diablo II. Which is ironic, because that’s what I bought it for.